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In a few weeks, we may find that the Eurofighter is not just our only fighter - but our only fast jet of any kind

The useable RAF Eurofighter fleet seems set to stabilise at around 140 jets, including some spares to allow for crashes. Cost to the UK taxpayer for this fleet was estimated by the MoD in recent years as £20bn (£140m per jet), though this assumes planes mostly unmodified from the original design - conceived as a pure air-to-air fighter. Some RAF Eurofighters have now been modified to drop American smartbombs using an Israeli targeting pod, but the RAF is known to consider this an "austere" bomber capability and the air service is keen to see massive upgrades to at least some of its fleet, turning them into modern deep-penetration bombers capable of mounting raids against countries protected by the latest Russian missiles. Some reports have suggested that these modifications (if approved) could cost the UK taxpayer an additional £5bn and push the price per RAF jet to £180m - the same kind of price paid by the USA for its F-22 Raptor stealth superfighter. The Eurofighter, even if enhanced, would lack various technologies featured by the Raptor - most obviously Stealth and thrust vectoring. At the moment it doesn't even have a trendy electronically-scanned radar of the sort becoming de rigueur in fighters - and indeed in fairly ordinary cars.

With the new UK government's Strategic Defence and Security Review process now drawing to a close, plans are shortly to be unveiled which will cut MoD spending severely and cut planned expenditure even more severely - as planned expenditure for the next ten years has for a long time been much larger than the planned budget.

Various things may come from this: it has reasonably been suggested that the RAF may be stripped of all its fast jets except the Eurofighter. The Harrier jumpjet was to go soon in any event - indeed it has been suggested that the RAF would have been glad to swap it for Eurobomber upgrades before now, with (from the airmen's point of view) the added benefit of leaving the Royal Navy without any jets to fly from its carriers. Today's Harriers, both RAF and Navy operated, are organised as a single joint unit under RAF command.

The RAF would be much less happy to see its Tornado GR4 bomber fleet go, but this would save huge sums in running costs - doubtless enough to preserve the Eurofighter and perhaps to turn it into the modern deep-penetration bomber the airmen crave so much.

Even so, the Eurofighter more than any other single factor has been responsible for the lamentable mess in which our armed services - the joint-third best funded on the planet - currently find themselves. The billions squandered on Eurofighter and similar idiocies - Nimrod MRA4 et inglorious cetera - down the decades have crippled our combat forces, to the point where they struggle to deploy and properly support a single brigade engaged against primitively-equipped enemies.

Some of us at least will have felt, if not safer, then at any rate more cheerful to be protected as we were last month - by a trusty Spitfire. ®

Bootnote

*Channel 4's Dispatches programme, in an otherwise excellent report on MoD waste last night (briefly featuring your correspondent) stated that the Eurofighter was delivered "four years late" - perhaps causing some jaws to drop among knowledgeable viewers. One might note that the project was known at one point as "Eurofighter 2000", causing some red faces at BAE Systems and elsewhere as the new millennium came and went without the arrival of any jets. Even the "2000" rebranding was actually an attempt to conceal the fact that the plane had originally been mean to turn up no later than 1995.